one is startled at finding anything human that seems less than human. He
was kneeling there among the low verdure of a shallow valley, and looked
like an old gray rock or some prehistoric animal. I stopped to look at
him, but he paid no heed, and seemed only to shrink into himself as
though, if he kept silent, he might be taken for stock or stone. I
addressed him but he made no answer. I went nearer, with a sensation of
uncanny wonder; but he did not so much as glance up at me, though he
knew I was there. His old brown basket was near him and the cane beside
it. He was gathering pennyroyal.

"Another man who is taking an unexpected crop from Old Howieson's
acres," I thought to myself.

I watched him for some moments, quite still, as one might watch a turtle
or a woodchuck--and left him there.

Since then I have heard something about him, and seen him once or
twice. A strange old man, a wanderer upon the face of the fragrant
earth. Spring and summer he wears always an old overcoat, and carries a
basket with double covers, very much worn and brown with usage. His cane
is of hickory with a crooked root for a handle, this also shiny with
age. He gathers bitter-bark, tansy; ginseng, calamus, smartweed, and
slippery elm, and from along old fences and barnyards, catnip and
boneset, I suppose he lives somewhere, a hole in a log, or the limb of a
tree, but no one knows where it is, or how he dries or cures his
findings. No one knows his name: perhaps he has forgotten it himself. A
name is no great matter anyway. He is called simply the Herbman. He
drifts into our valley in the spring, is seen here and there on the
hills or in the fields, like the crows or the blackbirds, and disappears
in the fall with the robins and the maple leaves. Perhaps he is one of